Amul Girl turns 50: Meet the three men who keep her going

The Amul campaign was started by daCunha’s father Sylvester daCunha in 1966 along with illustrator Eustace Fernandes and Usha Katrak, among others.Anirban Chowdhury | ET Bureau | October 16, 2016, 12:52 IST

The noseless girl with blue hair has been nosing around in her red polka-dotted frock. She looked up at Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the summer of 2014 with the oneliner Accha din-ner aaya hai.

When his monogrammed suit was being auctioned, she cheekily smiled with the tagline “And the highest court is...”. The Amul girl, a buttered toast in one hand and a prompt oneliner on her lips, has been a commentator on the zeitgeist for 50 years — from sterilisation during the Emergency (“We have always practised compulsory sterilisation,” says the Amul girl, holding a salver of butter and with a cunning innocence that would have tied up even Indira Gandhi’s censors in knots) to Aamir Khan’s statement on growing intolerance (Amul girl offered a golden slice and asked him Aal izz hell or aal izz well?).

When Amul tweeted a birthday wish last month to Modi, who has been the butt of its butter jokes, he replied, “Thank you. Your sense of humour has always been widely admired.” The Amul girl is the nice brat who gets away with it: her wide-eyed innocence is a counterpoint to her stinging wit, her young looks are balanced by her weighty statements, her hand-painted nostalgia is offset by her on-the-ball cool. “As India gets darker, the campaign is a ray of sunshine to make people laugh about what they are feeling dark about,” Rahul daCunha, creative director of daCunha Communications and the man driving the Amul campaign, tells ET Magazine.

Daily ButterThe Amul campaign was started by daCunha’s father Sylvester daCunha in 1966 along with illustrator Eustace Fernandes and Usha Katrak, among others. It was a prestigious account, but the ads had been staid and stuck to the basic brief of selling butter. When Sylvester took over, he decided to pitch it differently. “My dad realised that there was only so much one could say about food,” says Rahul.

“There was no television and print was wildly expensive. An outdoor hoarding was a good way to inform people.” The first topical ad came out in March 1966 when horse racing was becoming big. It featured the Amul girl riding a horse, with the word “Thoroughbread”, followed by the famous slogan, Utterly Butterly Delicious. Rahul daCunha inherited the Amul campaign from his father in the early 1990s.

All through his childhood and youth, he says, his father gave him paltry pocket money with the justification that he would give him the Amul campaign. While passing it on, Sylvester had a word of advice for his son: don’t “get into too much trouble, but say things the way they need to be said”. During Sylvester’s time itself, a Mumbai hoarding on Ganesh Chaturthi went Ganpati Bappa More Ghya past(Ganpati, Eat More), a play on the festival cry Ganpati Bappa Morya, and earned the wrath of Shiv Sena members who threatened to vandalise his office. Under Rahul, the campaign increasingly commented on politics, films and sports, but stayed clear of religious issues. The ads became controversial nevertheless. When allegations were swirling around Jagmohan Dalmiya, former chief of the Board of Control for Cricket in India, an Amul hoarding showed him in the manner of “hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil” monkeys and a tagline that went “Dalmiya mein kuchh kala hai?”.

Dalmiya threatened to sue Kurien for Rs 500 crore, says daCunha. Last year, British Airways too called the agency to express its displeasure, when it was dubbed “British Errways” after Sachin Tendulkar’s luggage got misplaced. Manish Jhaveri, the sole copywriter for the Amul campaign, says its vocabulary got a distinct stamp in 1995. When there was a leadership tangle involving PV Narasimha Rao, Sonia Gandhi and VP Singh, Amul came up with the line Party, Patni Ya Woh, a take on the film Pati, Patni Aur Woh. Jhaveri says the ad established Amul’s style of punning, borrowing from popular culture and mixing the colloquial and regional with the formal.

Pushing the vernacular flavour, Amul has done campaigns in Tamil, Gujarati, Bengali and Punjabi as well. daCunha says the fearlessness of the Amul campaign has trickled down from the visionary Verghese Kurien, who established the Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation (GCMMF) that sells its products under the Amul brand. When Dalmiya threatened to take Kurien to court, he called daCunha and asked him to put up a fresh board outside Dalmiya’s office in Kolkata. This one would have a fourth Dalmiya, covering his pelvic area with his hands.

Thankfully, it didn’t come to that, but the bold streak has endured even after Kurien’s death in 2012. “We believe in consistency. We have never changed our ad agency,” says RS Sodhi, managing director, GCMMF, about daCunha Communications. “They know what they are doing. We have faith in their work and we mostly don’t even look at the drafts before they go up on hoardings.”

Making of an Amul AdAmul has arguably the longest running hoarding ad campaign in India. It might also have one of the smallest ad teams. Apart from Da-Cunha and Jhaveri, who has been with the campaign for 22 years, the only other person integral to it is illustrator Jayant Rane, who has been sketching for 30 years. Their output has kept pace with the times.

“In the 1960s, we used to do one ad a month; in the ’70s and ’80s we did one every fortnight; in the ’90s that increased to one a week; now we put out up to five ads every week,” says daCunha, adding that they cannot afford to slacken the pace as a topic “will be dead in three days”. The campaign’s target audience is the multitasking, up-to-date and opinionated 16-25-year-olds who see the world through their smartphones and have really short attention spans. DaCunha says this is an audience that shifts sides and changes opinions at the drop of a hat. An ad has to catch them by the scruff of their neck when an issue is red-hot. Choosing a subject for an ad and deciding on the exact moment to come out with it is a science, says da-Cunha.

He uses the term “topic plus”, which means an issue that affects the public psyche and elicits dynamic and not just one-dimensional reactions or black/white opinions.

“For example, when Pakistan attacked Uri, I didn’t know what people were feeling about it. I didn’t know what our response as a country will be. Doing an ad sometimes involves holding back and waiting for public perception,” he says. The waiting paid off. India carried out surgical strikes along the LoC, which led to Amul’s “sURIgical Strikes”. Social media has become the weather vane to gauge public perception. “I get the trend from newspapers. But I get the point of view from social media,” says daCunha.

They now put out more ads on social media than on hoardings. This means Rane has to be extra careful with the detailing as illustrations are more vivid on a screen than on an overhead hoarding. For an ad celebrating the 500th Test match of Team India on September 22, Rane, for instance, searched for the exact shade of the cricketers’ blazers.

What Not to WriteThe Amul girl has withstood the test of time when many other mascots — Asian Paints’ Gattu, the Onida devil or the Air India maharaja — have either been discarded by the brands (Asian Paints and Onida) or not been used to their full potential (Air India). DaCunha and his team know what has worked for the campaign, which is why it has undergone little change over the years. In an age of multi-generic art forms, the Amul ads are still painstakingly hand-painted by Rane. He was introduced to the Amul moppet through scrapbooks compiled by the previous teams.

He calls them “guide books” and has followed them. Rane says it’s a stylistic decision to give the Amul girl’s features — chubby cheeks, no nose, wide eyes and long eyelashes — to celebrities who are featured in the ad. Small allowances are made for discernible features such as Amitabh Bachchan’s white French beard or Tendulkar’s curly hair. The campaign has a list of favourite people and a checklist of attributes on what it takes to make it to the hoarding. Boring is out. Openness is in.

A person needs to have “failed or succeeded openly”, says daCunha. In Bollywood, Bachchan is a favourite as are Shah Rukh Khan and Karan Johar. Among politicians, apart from Modi, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and his Tamil Nadu counterpart J Jayalalitha are preferred. Idiosyncrasies are a big draw — like Kejriwal’s muffler and the facial features of Lalu Prasad Yadav and Mulayam Singh Yadav. But Mulayam’s son and UP CM Akhilesh Yadav doesn’t quite make the cut. Among businessmen, Vijay Mallya and the Ambanis have been covered often but Ratan Tata was drawn only once — when he retired, says daCunha. The ad has never used real people or thought of a brand ambassador. DaCunha says he is against roping in celebs for ad campaigns: “The star becomes more relevant than the product. I don’t know any more what cricketer MS Dhoni advertises these days. Bachchan is every other brand.”

All of this helps in keeping the Amul ads simple and cost-effective. Amul spends 1% of its total turnover on marketing, says Sodhi. GCMMF last year clocked a turnover of Rs 23,000 crore. Apart from daCunha Communications, ad agency FCB Ulka handles the advertising for Amul’s other products. Piyush Pandey, chairman of Ogilvy & Mather India, says, “I think they have done a great job for decades,” adding that maybe they should be more choosy. “They could do with being more selective to live up to their own standards.

Sometimes less is more.” He says he wouldn’t, however, change the old look and feel of the ads. “They stand out because of that basic art. Sometimes old is gold.” The makers of the Amul ad are careful about what the Amul girl says. While public humour in India has changed, peppered with innuendos, the Amul girl indulges in none of that. “She is a kid,” says daCunha. “She is also really old,” he adds, pointing to the paradox that defines the Amul girl. Also, people feel responsible for her. A few years back, the Amul girl had featured as one of the characters in the ads. Once she was a cheerleader at an IPL match and daCunha faced angry comments on why she was portrayed in a short skirt. Now, he says, he tries to keep her at an objective distance, “as a commentator not a character”. DaCunha employs people for production and admin work but doesn’t hire anyone else for the campaign. Nor has he felt the need to take up another similar assignment.

“Anything else we take up will be an alsoran,” he says. DaCunha is 54, Jhaveri 47 and Rane is 57. What about succession? They are not thinking about it. They are not even thinking about taking a long vacation. The trio say they almost never switch off from the campaign and are wired to work even on holidays. Rane hardly ever goes on vacations. When asked what would happen if some day Jhaveri asks for a three-month holiday, daCunha says: “I’d shoot him!” All this for the with-it girl with blue hair who loves her pun maska.